Bernie Sanders Is The Only Choice

01/20/2016 04:37 pm ETUpdated
Jan 20, 2017

BIRMINGHAM, AL - JANUARY 18: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) walks with wife Jane Sanders and other family members as he prepares to speak at Boutwell Auditorium, January 18, 2016 in Birmingham, Alabama. Sanders spoke to a capacity crowd of around 5,000 supporters. (Photo by Hal Yeager/Getty Images)

Maybe it would be easier to vote for Hillary Clinton if she wasn't such an insistently unconvincing liar. Bill Clinton used lies the way Van Gogh used yellow, to intensify and transcend reality. Hillary's lies are shameless and strident and form not so much an argument as a cascading aural sludge pile. Most Sanders' supporters, armed with facts but not hip waders, are forced to back slowly away from her speeches lest the rising effluent suck them down to the cretinous levels of centrists, neoliberals, and Joan Walsh.

You don't need a degree in oncology to know that Clintonism is an ever metastasizing cancer on the body of the Democratic party. If politics is the art of the possible, Clintonism is defining possibility downward. At its core is the belief that a nation can triangulate out of the responsibilities of a social conscience.

Hillary's policy positions are as tangible as the shadows in Plato's cave. But the Clintons love words and, like Henry Cabot Lodge, are endlessly looking for anything they can appear to do. And the "liberal" media love the Clintons.

One of the most nauseating aspects of this race has been to watch, nightly, as MSNBC ceaselessly decrees the boundaries of the possible. Not just in-the-tank hacks like Walsh but paid health-care lobbyist Howard Dean seemingly live in the studio to extol the virtues of pragmatism over position.

Even more troubling is their insistence that Sanders will lose the black vote. That in the year 2016, in the time of #BlackLives activism, the black vote is a monolith of entrenched Clinton support. But maybe, just maybe, blacks will look at Sanders' call for social and economic justice and prefer it to the woman whose husband gutted welfare. Who gave us a permanent eligibility ban on food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense, even marijuana possession. Who tripled federal prisons while more than halving public housing. Who expanded the death penalty. And who used Sister Souljah's comments on the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King as a chance to prove his fairness by equating her with the Klan.

One other thing. To care more about Glass-Steagall than the glass ceiling means you oppose Hillary's vision not her vagina. The only foreign policy difference between Hillary and Margaret Thatcher is that the more bellicose and reckless one is still living.

And finally, when it comes to the money power in this country, where FDR welcomed their hatred HRC welcomes their money. That the Clintons are impossible to embarrass about this (or anything) doesn't mean the rest of us should be.

The Clintons function by blurring lines, confusing issues and always, always making the fight about wrongs done to them. Only in this parallel universe could a man who has fought for his consistent convictions his entire adult life, who is forming an ever growing movement of the diverse, displaced and disaffected, be viewed as inferior to the candidate of Walmart, Wall Street and war.

If Hillary Clinton really is the only chance to avoid a Trump or Cruz presidency, then that is a choice offered from the bowels of a fetid and decaying empire. It is a choice less worthy of a vote than it is a chapter by Edward Gibbon.

The truth is Bernie Sanders can win the nomination and has a far better chance to win the Presidency...no matter what Chris Matthews or Mrs. Greenspan or anyone else at MSNBC thinks you should think.